Post-fire Recovery of Soil Organic Layer Carbon in Canadian Boreal Forests, 2015-2018

This dataset provides site moisture, soil organic layer thickness, soil organic carbon, nonvascular plant functional group, stand dominance, ecozone, time-after-fire, jack pine proportion, and deciduous proportion for 511 forested plots spanning ~140,000 km2 across two ecozones of the Northwest Territories, Canada (NWT). The plots were established during 2015-2018 across 41 wildfire scars and unburned areas (no burn history prior to 1965), with 317 plots in the Plains and 194 plots in the Shield regions. At each plot, two adjacent 30-m transects were established 2 m apart, running north from the plot origin. Soil organic layer (SOL) depth (cm) was measured every 3 m and the mean was taken from the 10 measurements to calculate a plot-level SOL thickness. Three soil organic layer profiles were destructively sampled at 0, 12, and 24 m using a corer that was custom designed for NWT soils. Within the transects, all stems taller than 1.37 m were identified to species to calculate tree density (stems / m2). Nonvascular plant percent cover was identified to functional group at five, 1-m2 quadrats spaced 6 m apart along the belt transect. A subset of 2,067 of 5,137 total increments from 1,803 profiles from 421 plots were analyzed for total percent C using a CHN analyzer. Time-after-fire was established using fire history records. For older plots where no known fire history is recorded, tree age was used. Data are for the period 2015-06-11 to 2018-08-24 and are provided in comma-separated values (CSV) format.

Data and Resources

Additional Info

Field Value
Maintainer Earthdata Forum
Last Updated August 25, 2026, 09:50 (UTC)
Created April 1, 2025, 18:25 (UTC)
accessLevel public
bureauCode {026:00}
catalog_conformsTo https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
harvest_object_id 6b9f7a66-bb03-4842-bc87-98b22357a4e8
harvest_source_id b99e41c6-fe79-4c19-bbc3-9b6c8111bfac
harvest_source_title Science Discovery Engine
identifier 10.3334/ORNLDAAC/2235
license https://www.usa.gov/government-works
modified 2026-08-17T22:16:02Z
programCode {026:000}
publisher ORNL_DAAC
resource-type Dataset
source_datajson_identifier true
source_hash b2355814ca19cfa7b50f9e6c636b38974462dcb0d524affa4827e10f6417c23c
source_schema_version 1.1
spatial ["CARTESIAN", [{"WestBoundingCoordinate": -132.671, "NorthBoundingCoordinate": 68.3256, "EastBoundingCoordinate": -104.194, "SouthBoundingCoordinate": 59.7883}]]
temporal 2015-06-11/2018-08-24
theme {"Earth Science"}